


I'm Not A Killer

by 1000001nights



Series: Black Widow: Red Ledger [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 10:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4743713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000001nights/pseuds/1000001nights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story will feature a trigger warning for violence and abuse. There is no gore, but there is blood, and fighting between characters who are being forced to continue. The depictions are not visually graphic, but the context may be offensive.</p><p>But the story is really good! This is to depict the brutal reality of training inside the Red Room of the Black Widow program. So don't worry too much. It's at the end anyway.</p>
    </blockquote>





	I'm Not A Killer

**Author's Note:**

> This story will feature a trigger warning for violence and abuse. There is no gore, but there is blood, and fighting between characters who are being forced to continue. The depictions are not visually graphic, but the context may be offensive.
> 
> But the story is really good! This is to depict the brutal reality of training inside the Red Room of the Black Widow program. So don't worry too much. It's at the end anyway.

“So what happened?” Steve asked. Natasha took a break to sip her tea. Steve just looked at her. There was something in his eyes, something that he wanted to say. Nat tried to keep her mind focused, but sometimes, she liked the way Steve looked at her… Like she could do anything. He inspired that in people. Even she wasn’t immune to the charms of Captain America.

“It wasn’t so bad at first,” Natasha said, running her finger along the edge of her cup. “I liked it, actually, before it became what it really was. To the outside world, we were ballerinas. It even started off that way. I could probably still show you a proper  _pas de chat_ , but that’s about as far as we got.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Steve said childishly. Nat laughed darkly.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just an exercise. Ballet proved the perfect set up for what they wanted us to do. Strength. Discipline. Strict rules, which were never to be broken. Some ballet teachers hit their students. Just taps on the foot, on the sole -  _lift that up more_ \- that sort of thing. But we got used to it. We thought it was normal. When it got worse, we didn’t question it. We worked harder. There were maybe thirty of us at the beginning, all girls. To the world, thirty perfect ballerinas. Then it became something else.”

“And that was The Red Room?”

“Basically,” Nat said. “Where it all began.”

“How did it start?” Steve asked. “This program. Was it new?”

“No,” Natasha said, shaking her head. She remembered the histories they learned, the legacy they were all a part of… “Not at all,” she said. “I was the culmination of almost seventy years of diligent work. The program began in the thirties, but it was nothing then. No one took it seriously. But the war changed things. After World War II ended, everyone knew the world had changed. Hydra. The balance of power. It was slipping, and everyone was looking to recreate… well,  _you_. No offence.”

“None taken,” Steve said, leaning back and crossing his arms. His shirt looked like it might pop like a balloon. “If they were trying to create me,” he said, “I guess they failed.”

“In a way,” Nat replied. “But they were going about it all wrong, luckily for the rest of the world. We might be speaking Russian now if fate had been less kind, and you’d have woken up into a very different world. We realized later that, with you, the SSR got lucky. You already  _were_ the perfect soldier, you just had the wrong body. But giving someone the perfect body, or the perfect weapon, doesn’t make them the perfect soldier. Everyone was going about it looking for an answer in science, technology, medicine. The Red Skull’s old notes, Howard Stark, all the stuff we’re still doing today. But they were wrong. The perfect soldier isn’t created. The perfect soldier has to be  _bred_.”

“So that’s what this was? Training?” Steve shook his head. “I can’t believe that kind of thing still existed, so recently.”

“It’s been around for a long time. The Russian government wasn’t going to abandon it until it showed real results. The program was started during World War II, back when it looked like Russia might be in trouble from Schmidt and Hydra. Back then, it was hardly anything. A sideshow. No one cared. But after you, after the scramble for a new  _captain_ , it began to look more appealing. While the craze over all the ways to manufacture a superhero was still going on, the program was building, growing, thriving. It wasn’t until the mid-forties that the program got its first real test. But by then, it was ready.”

“What happened?” Steve asked.

“Russia had lost the chance to buy some of Howard Stark’s black market inventions. They tried to strike a deal with some Hydra wannabe called ‘Leviathan,’ but it went south. The SSR beat them, stopped Leviathan, wrote it into their own history. Another victory. But not for Russia. By then, Russia was out of options, and the program was starting to look really good. The government wanted a proper test, and now, they had a target. The SSR had shamed them. So, they sent sleeper agents into the US, and if you can believe the rumours, they almost managed to kill Howard Stark. The program never said what happened, but I learned later that the SSR stopped them.”

“Peggy,” Steve said. He looked like he wanted to say more, but he couldn’t bring himself to.

“It makes sense,” Nat said. “From what I’ve heard. She would’ve made a great candidate for the program, not that I’d ever wish it on anyone. Back then, no one suspected anything of women; they hardly do these days. The program took young girls like me - some of them as young as 10 when they started - and taught them how to do whatever they had to. Fight. Shoot. Kill. Seduce. Steal. They made spies. The war was over, but the program had anticipated what Russia would need. The soldiers of the future weren’t on the front lines, they were spies. Russia needed a new weapon. They got Black Widow.”

“That’s how you got your codename?” Steve said. “I never asked. Wasn’t sure you wanted to talk about it. I guess now is as good a time as any.”

“It’s the name I got,” Nat said. “It’s not the name I wanted.”

“And Natasha? Where did that come from? Your file, and in your story… You were born Natalia Romanova.”

“When I came to America, I wanted to start over, and I needed a new name. Natalia becomes Natalie pretty easily, and I used that some of the time… Natalie Rushman. Stark still doesn’t know what to call me on the best of days. But it was too close. Too similar. There was too much pain in my old name. So I took another one. I made something new for myself, and Natasha Romanoff was born.”

“Did it have to be the same initials?” Steve asked with a smile.

“You can only run so far from what you are, Cap. I’m sure you know that.”

“Yeah,” he said seriously. He leaned forward, and Net felt compelled to move closer to him.

“So this program… If it’s been around for decades, there have to have been others.”

“Some,” Natasha said. “None as promising as me, apparently. There had been Black Widows before me, and there might be more after. There may be another one, right at this moment.” Steve shook his head. “At least we know they’re not like you,” he said. “Nobody’s like you.” Nat smiled, but she rolled her eyes.

“Thanks,” she said. “By the end of the program, there were only a few of us. Less than half made it through training. I don’t know what happened to the other girls. But there was this one girl… Yelena. Yelena Belova. I’ll never forget her. We were friends, if you can call it that. Before they broke us. Before they took everything from me.”

*

Yelena was blonde.

In a way, that made her like me. All the other girls had dark hair. In Russia, many girls have dark hair. They blend in, disappear into a crowd. They wanted to be shadows, unseen, unheard. But Yelena and me, we were loud. Our hair shone bright in a dark crowd. It spoke through the roar of people. We couldn’t hide. That made us different. That made us targets.

Yelena was a bigger girl than me. I liked her, from the moment I first met her. She didn’t let being big become a problem for her. She was tall, a head taller than I was for as long as I knew her, and her body was ropey with muscles. Not the kind I had, practical and functional and twisting to their ends, fighting to hang on. Yelena was big. Her arms were like a boy’s. Her legs were thick and shaped in smooth curves, hard and sloping, like a car, like an engine of war. She had breasts before any of us, and they got bigger than anyone could have guessed. She dropped the ballet guise first. Ballerinas are small, and dainty. Strong, but delicate. Yelena was not like that. But the teachers liked her. She had the look, eyes like ice, a face cut from stone. She was terrifying, but she was kind. As an enemy, she would fight to kill. As a friend, she would die for her comrades. They picked her first, of the thirty of us. I went third. We were friends before the other seven were selected. They all had brown hair. Yelena and I, we were a team. We had a bond. We shared blood.

That was the first thing they tried to take from us. We weren’t friends in The Red Room, we weren’t allies. We were competition. Every girl there was led to believe that only one of us would make it through. So we fought, all of us, and when we fought, we fought each other. Yelena and I fought often. I wasn’t the smallest, and I certainly wasn’t the weakest, but Yelena was bigger than all of us, and some of the smaller girls - the thinner ones who took more easily to ballet - they could outpace her. Their holds were too weak to stop her, but they could wear her down. Tire her. Some of them eventually won. Most lost, but they saw the other’s tactics. They improved. Then they started into fighting each other. That left me and Yelena.

I didn’t fight like the other girls. I fought like Yelena. Head on. Full force. Precise. Exact. Deadly. It brought us closer. But Yelena was me, only bigger. She was stronger, and at a distance, faster and more agile. I had to close inside her range to do any real damage. She almost always got me before I could make it there. Her fists hit hard. If we pulled our punches, the instructors struck us with a switch. If we missed on purpose, they could tell. We built muscles from resistance. The first time I got punched in the gut, I spat up my breakfast. The twentieth time? The fiftieth? The hundredth? I hardly felt it anymore. Pain was numbing. I’d grown soft in my time with Ivan. By then, when I was fighting Yelena, I barely saw him. We lived on the campus, The Red Room was our home, and there, I grew hard again. Part of me hated it. Part of me missed it, more than I ever knew. And as Yelena and I grew closer over it, over fighting and training and getting better, I knew what I really missed. That connection. That bond of life. The smell of blood, like copper. Like ash. Life and death, in our deadly ballet. Yelena and I gave that to each other.

“You keep your hands too close,” Yelena said one morning, as she stood across from me, in the courtyard just outside our dormitory. We were walled in on every side, so no one could see us, and as it was morning, crisp and cool and just before training was to begin, we were free to do what we liked. The sun was barely up. Just Yelena and me, and the quiet of the morning.

“Your guard doesn’t protect you. I can still punch, like this, see?” She thrust a fist right at me, but pulled up just short. My eyes strained on the muscles in her bare arm, how they tensed, and then loosened as she pulled away. “You should keep your arms out more, like this,” she took a fighting stance, arms bent at almost ninety degrees in front of her face. “Now you can’t hit me, and if you strike, I can block, and retaliate, like…” she forced me to punch, and grabbed my limp arm, flipping me so I landed hard on my back, “that!” She laughed. I winced, but looking up at her, I laughed too. “You are a good fighter, Romanova,” she said. “Just because I beat you doesn’t mean you aren’t strong.”

“I know,” I said. She helped me to my feet. Her hand in mine was warm and comforting. “Why did they choose such a small girl?” she asked. I shrugged. All I could think to say was, “I knew the right people, I guess.”

“Or the wrong ones,” Yelena smirked. She put her arm around me, enclosing me in her strong embrace. I jabbed her with my elbow, and she winced away. We both laughed. “I like fighting you,” Yelena said. “Whatever this is, we will work together. Yes? We will fight together?”

“Yes,” I said. She smiled. Her teeth were like mine, crooked, and in the process of being fixed. We’d both worn braces for a time. We had to look the part they wanted us to play.

“Do you promise?” Yelena asked.

“I…” Something choked in my empty throat. The words caught on it.

“What?” Yelena asked.

“I just…” I sighed. I could feel tears forming. I didn’t want to cry in front of Yelena. I would never live down the shame. “I’ve never made a promise before,” I said. Yelena laughed.

“It’s easy.” She offered me her big hand. “We shake. You say something. You mean it.”

“I know how it works, stupid,” I said. “I’ve just never done it. So how can I know if I can keep it?”

“You just do,” Yelena said. “You say it, and then you mean it. I trust you, Romanova.”

“Alright Belova,” I said. I took her hand, and squeezed as hard as I could. “Promise.”

“They will not break us,” she said. “We will break them. We fight together, we cannot lose.”

There was something I wanted to say to her then, in the back of my mind. I didn’t know then, and I can’t seem to face it now, but there was a word, a feeling, forming there that I wanted her to know. Instead, I just said, “can’t lose!” Yelena laughed. She laughed like a boy, her mouth wide, her crooked teeth showing, unabashedly. Her voice dropped low, and her laugh rolled like thunder in the empty courtyard. “I like you, Romanova,” she said.

“I like you, Belova,” I said. “Don’t make me regret it.” It was close, but not what I wanted to say. We went back inside. Fight training would start soon, and after our warm up, we were ready. We liked to fight, so long as it was together.

What I liked less was all the rest. The dogma. The propaganda. Brainwashing. They didn’t just need us to be strong, quick, deadly.  They needed us to follow orders. This was important above all else. We had to execute, but we also had to obey. Without question.

This part was hard for me. I was beaten more in the schoolroom than I was in the training yard, or in The Red Room where we took our tests. I learned fast that it wasn’t right to speak up. It wasn’t right to ask questions. There was no time to misunderstand. Little girls who didn’t catch on quickly disappeared without a word. Two were gone in the first month. I was lucky. Those might have been me, and then I don’t know where I would have ended up. I rarely saw anyone but my fellow recruits, and Yelena. And the teachers. Big women with switches. Men with broken-in fists. Girls like us. Older, dressed in black, with the bodies of women.  _Other students?_  I often wondered. _Graduates? Was it possible to get through? Get out?_ Ivan wasn’t there to save me. No one was there. Just me. Me, and whatever I could do to save myself. Like the streets, only harder. Here, people cared, but not in the nice way.

They drilled us for weeks. They taught us to speak American English. We would all be from the midwest, from a small town no one had heard of. We would have no past. It was the past of all Americans. Our history was theirs. We knew every president. I memorized the important ones. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. Lincoln. Johnson. Grant. Roosevelt. Taft. Wilson. Harding. Eisenhower. Kennedy. Johnson. Nixon. We were better educated than most American children. We learned everything we could. We watched American movies. We watched American television. But we were not to enjoy. It was not for recreation. We would study. We would learn their famous lines. We would remember odd plots and references, inside jokes we did not belong to, in a world half a planet away. We would be them. From the inside, out. By sixteen, I was a little American girl.

“Do girls in America have red hair?” I remember asking.

Ms. Ilsa struck me.

“May we watch more movies in our free time?” I asked. I loved the American films. I had never seen one before then, and I wanted more.

Ms. Sonya struck me.

“Must I strike below the belt?” I asked in training.

Mr. Anatoly struck me.

I learned quickly. I grew silent. The only person I could trust was myself.

And Yelena. There was always Yelena. After we fought, she held me, or I held her. We did it in private, where no one else could see. Her arms enclosed me, her hand tight around her own wrist, and I felt safe. My arms could barely make it around her, but when she was hurt, when she cried in her private moments, I held her by her thick, tight waist. They tried to split us apart in training. We were not allowed to sit together in the classroom. We were forbidden to speak wherever we could be seen. We were made to fight. They wanted us to hate each other. But we learned. We grew. And in doing so, we became closer.

I shared Yelena’s bed more than once, and she mine. We never touched each other, except when one of us was sad, and needed a closeness neither of us understood. We knew it wasn’t what we were meant to do. When the girls were old enough, they taught them how to make men love them. Even at sixteen, they made us think of men. Men of all ages. Boys, grown men, old men. Women were nothing to the organization. Just tools. In a way, that’s what Yelena and I were to each other. Tools, to feel better when we cried at night, to feel safe when we felt alone, to feel strong when our muscles gave out, our spirits faltered, our minds nearly broke. That word I wanted to say, that feeling I needed to express… Yelena was that to me, and more. Whatever bond we had, it was sealed a thousand times over by our trials. We were both certain that they could not shatter our bond. But  _that_  is what they took away from us. A black widow has no room for that kind of connection. Her affection is poison. Her love is death.

A black widow eats her mate.

In the final days of testing, they made sure at least one of us knew it.

I stood at the end of the room, a red circle on the gymnasium floor between myself and Yelena. The remaining recruits - three girls, each with dark hair and flat, dead, cold eyes - were watching. All in uniform - black shirt, black pants, black shoes, red belt, hair tied back in a black ribbon - they looked the same. Three ghosts, watching us. Every teacher was there. Everyone involved in the program. I didn’t understand then. Yelena was smiling, bouncing on the balls of her feet. This was our final test, but to us, it was another sparring match. A walled-in mezzanine with sharp, thin windows looked down on us. Silhouettes paced up there, watching; more ghosts. Mr. Anatoly was in the ring with us, inside the red circle, officiating, making sure we fought hard, we didn’t give up. He brought us to the centre, and with his hand firmly on our shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh, he spoke privately to us.

“You will fight as hard as you can. You will obey what you are told to do. You will make this program proud, and one of you may find yourself moving up.”

I nodded, first to Mr. Anatoly, then to Yelena. She did the same, but she added, with an almost imperceptible motion, a quiet, private, intimate wink for me. We knew how to dance together, to make our fight look real and violent and visceral. It was a test. Everything was a test, but this was one of our own invention. We were testing  _them_ , to see if they could tell. Yelena stretched her long arms and walked backward to her place at the end of the red circle. I did the same, trying to clear my mind. My shoulder ached, and my stomach was sore from training the day before. Yelena never showed her pain, not to anyone but the darkness and me. She breathed in deeply, and her chest rose, the muscles in her stomach tightened into knots. I tensed my own body. I felt it tighten, I felt it loosen, then tighten again. Mr. Anatoly took his place between us, and everything froze. My breath turned to ice. The room turned from red to frigid white. Mr. Anatoly’s hand moved through the frozen air at a fraction of an inch per second. I stared at it, then my eyes met Yelena’s. Her cool eyes smiled, and time resumed. Mr. Anatoly’s signal ended, and Yelena was halfway across the circle before I could react.

I dodged. It was the only option left to me. I dropped to my knees and rolled sideways, trying to get behind her while still staying inside the ring. Step outside the ring, and you lost. I wouldn’t lose. We would show them what a team we made.

I rolled beside her, and Yelena turned in an instant. I prepared for a kick, but she sidestepped towards me and jabbed. My guard held, just like she told me, and I managed to get out of her reach as her last two punches swatted the air. She raised her fists, and I raised mine, and the fight started for real.

Yelena and I had a rhythm. I would go on the offensive and strike, and she would block, and I would grapple her, or dodge and kick, or strafe her retaliation, and get away, only for her to return on the offensive herself, and I would do as she did. She tricked me a few times, got a jab in when I wasn’t expecting it, or sweeping my legs and taking me to the floor, only for me to roll her and pin her. I could have taken her out then, beaten her to a pulp until she gave in, but I didn’t. That wasn’t the dance. Instead, I subtly shifted my weight, and she managed to throw me, and the fight resumed anew.

I got Yelena a few times, too. I wanted to impress them, even if it meant hurting my friend. She had done the same to me, so why not? She wasn’t perfect, and in training together, I knew her weaknesses. She left her face unguarded. She thought I was too small. I forced her guard up by jabbing up at her chin, which I could hardly reach if she ducked backwards. When she focused on defending her face, I went for her belt. I caught my fist on her hip once, and my knuckle wouldn’t stop smarting until the fight was over. But I got her in her strong stomach more than once, and after the first few blows, she was showing it. Taking a punch when you’re prepared is different than taking a hit you can’t see coming. After a while, Yelena started to look tired. Her guard shifted back down. By then, my blood was pumping. My heart was racing. The training took over. I was seeing red.

Yelena missed a jab, and as she stumbled forward, her face came towards me. I caught her in the chin, and I knew at once - as the shiver of the blow reverberated all the way to my shoulder - that she was seeing stars. She wheeled back, automatically assumed a defensive stance, then faltered. “Hit her!” Mr. Anatoly screamed, from what sounded like a mile away. “Finish her!”

Yelena was beaten. I would make it quick. She would want it that way. I ducked in towards her, edged closer as I slid my feet along the red floor, and caught her below her guard. She punched once, twice, but they were weak, and I turned the momentum against her. She slowed, she stumbled, and before I knew what I was doing, my mind rolled on like a machine, and I was in the air.

I kicked Yelena with both feet flat against her stomach, and she fell flat on the ground, her head bouncing off the floor. I landed, stumbling, but on my feet. When Yelena didn’t rise, I turned to the others, and waited, panting, my breath hot in my lungs.

Mr. Anatoly looked displeased. I was confused.  _I won_ , I remember thinking…  _didn’t I?_  The ghosts in the mezzanine were grumbling. “Finish her,” Anatoly hissed. My eyes went wide. “Finish her,” he repeated.

“She’s down!” I shouted, pointing at her prone form. Anatoly looked like he wanted to kill me. His eyes narrowed, and he bared his teeth.

“Your enemy falls, they can get back up. You finish them, they will never rise.”

“I’m not a killer!” I shouted. My voice cracked, and I felt like a child. My body ached. Yelena was still on the floor.

“No?” Anatoly said. He stepped towards me, and instinctively, I took a fighting stance. When he was close enough, I struck at him. His arms found my wrists, and in a blinding flash of pain, I was on my knees, my arm twisted behind my back. “You finish her,” Anatoly snarled in my ear, his breath hot on my neck, “or I break this arm.” He twisted, and I screamed. Hot tears burst in my eyes, but my mind was crying something else.  _No. NO. NO!_

“I won’t!” I cried, and with all the strength left in me, I rolled, and took Anatoly off his footing. He went to the ground, and I was back up before him. I struck him, clean across the cheek, bruising my already injured knuckles. I got in three good hits, and two glancing blows, before his foot caught me in the stomach. The air left me all at once.

Blood flew between my teeth. I sailed through the air in a graceful arc before I landed beside Yelena. She was breathing slowly, and could barely roll her eyes towards me. I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I struggled back to my feet. Anatoly was coming at me. There was red on his cheek. I screamed. I roared. I howled, and I flew at him. My training disappeared. I was on the streets again. I know I hurt him then. But it was not enough. He sent me to the floor, and it was for the last time. My strength gave out. I gave in. Anatoly lifted me by my red hair, and I couldn’t resist. He reached down to my waist and ripped my shirt off over my head. I knew what was coming. In my black sports bra, my back showed enough. The scars. Yelena struggled to rise. Neither of us wanted this. I heard the switch fetched from the far end of the room. Then, a voice cut through the silence.

“Natalia,” it said. I was on my knees. Just like I had been back then… When he first found me.

The voice was Ivan.

I looked up to the mezzanine, my eyes pleading. I couldn’t see him, but he was watching me. “Natalia,” he said again. His voice filled the Red Room.

“Finish her.”

“ _NO!_ ” I screamed, and the switch cracked across my back. I screamed again, and my entire body tensed. With a great effort, I found my feet. I stood. Every muscle in my body screamed with me, and the switch broke them down one by one. Yelena looked at me like an animal with her leg in a trap. She knew what was coming, and she couldn’t stop it. Standing there, I towered over her for the first time.

I did as I was told. I will never forget that day. I will never forget when my body, my mind, everyone I knew and everything I’d learned, betrayed me. They broke Natalia Romanova, and Yelena Belova paid the price. By the end, her face was red. Her breath came in choking gasps. My body was bleeding and drenched in sweat. I had cried every tear I could cry. My eyes were  _red_. I wanted nothing more than to hold her, to help her, I wanted to lick her wounds and kiss her and tell her it would be alright. But I wouldn’t see her for weeks after that. The Red Room had taken its toll, and they got what they wanted.  _Ivan_  got what he wanted all along. I had trusted him, and then, I knew I was wrong. I owed my life to Ivan. I will always remember that. But the life he gave me in return… It was not what I wanted. It was what  _he_  wanted.

I was right, after all. Everything I became, I owed to Ivan.

He took Yelena from me, but he could never make me kill her. That was my final victory. I struck her, I ended the fight, but they wanted me to continue, and I wouldn’t. I paid the last of the price. But the damage was done. When they named me victor of that final test, my face was stone. My heart was still. I was empty. All I knew was that, whatever I’d lost, Ivan had taken it from me.

So, when I was told that I would be allowed to meet him once again, I had only one thought in my mind.

It was not gratitude. It was revenge. Red, red, revenge.


End file.
